BELGIUM AND M. BONAPARTE.

New Zealander, Volume 9, Issue 718, 2 March 1853, Page 3

BELGIUM AND M. BONAPARTE.

[From the “ Examiner.”]

One would not have thought it an easy problem to deprive the press of its liberty yet leave it its licentiousness. M. Bonaparte has nevertheless accomplished this. The organs of every shade of opinion in France have been suppressed or gagged. Even those devoted to the Elyses are not allowed freescope of discussion. Fullswingforabuse, calumny, personal attack, base inuendoes, but for these alone, is permitted there. The war carried on against the character of all those generals and statesmen who have refused the oath to the new Constitution, has been renewed with increased bitterness. Rumours and surmises of all kinds concerning the past life and acts ot such men as Changarnier, Mole, Bcdeau, have been raked up; and a confiscation of character and repute is attempted where that of property or of freedom has been found impossible. The remonstrances and indignant refusals of the French exiles have come dated for the most part from different towns in Belgium. Belgium has become in consequence an object of insolent animadversion in Elysean prints. The freedom it enjoys is regarded as an eyesore as well as an inconvenience to Parisian officials, since the French have been brought back to slavery and wooden shoes. The attacks upon Belgium and its Government have been made chief!}' in the Constitutionnel, and signed by M. Granicr dc Cassagnac, whom the proprietors of that print now declares to have been the accredited agent of Louis Napoleon, and the exponent of his views in the journal.

The accusations and menaces directed against Belgium by the official writer were apropos commercial policy, which has of late been tending to break in some degree from its old prohibitive connection with France. During the reign of Louis Philippe, the Belgian Government did certainly deem it the best policy to ally itselt with France, and to establish on many commodities a joint tariff, excluding, for example, English twist from Belgium, except at the same high duties which were levied in France. If any country has had a right to complain of commercial exclusion from Belgium it certainly was England, yet England bore these little hostilities on the part of M. Guizot and King Leopold without murmur or remonstrance. The evil would soon cure itself, we said, and so it did. By drawing close to the French system of customs, Belgium became estranged from the Germans, and these turned to her rival, Holland, for the transit of English and colonial commodities, depriving Antwerp of its natural advantages. The Belgians have in consequence gradually come round from their exclusively French commercial policy, faulty, not because it is French, hut because it is narrow and prohibitive; and therefore those who enjoy the private society of the Elysee, and who are as far behind the age in their ideas ot political economy as in their notions of political liberty, nowpvoffer indignities, and threaten Belgium with fire and sword, for indulging in these approximations to free trade. Nor is it mere wordy bluster on the part of M. Granicr de Cassagnac, who deals out the menaces. He declares in plain set terms that he speaks the thoughts and the language of the Prince President, from whose mouth he had derived his knowledge; and he begs the Belgian ambassador, if he has any doubt on the subject, to go to the Elysee and enquire if he, Cassagnac, docs represent the President’s sentiments or not. Such monstrous impudence in the mouth of a hireling produced what must have been known to bo inevitable. The President disavowed. Ills tool, lie could not avoid doing it unless prepared to march an army into Belgium. But Messrs. Yeron and Cassagnac of the Constitutionncl are very sulky and indignantinconsequence, insisting to the last that the menaces against Belgium came from the very mouth of the Chief of the State. And no doubt they did. One is obliged for once to believe even M. Yeron and M. Cassagnac. He who has had the meannesss to confiscate the private property of King Leopold and his children in France would assuredly not scruple to deprive him of his kingdom, if the act of repacity could be committed with prudence or impunity. M. de Girardin in the Pressa points out with great force the selfish and unwarrantable greed which would impel French armies upon Belgium. The latter country is the freest in Continental Europe. It has realised the wildest hopes of liberty, without in any way endangering or disturbing social order. The representative system exists there in the fullest development and authority. The press is free. The right of association is admitted. The clergy maintain their rights and influence legally, and the lay party opposed to ecclesiastical encroachments are yet able to resist with temper, with talent, and success. There are few branches of industry not developed in Belgium, and though devoid of colonies, it still contrives to carry on a large export trade. Some of the most difficult political experiments have been skilfully and successfully made by the Belgian Government. Its giving full freedom to the Catholic clergy, without allowing either education or the representative system to be encroached upon or unduly influenced by them, has been in itself alone a very great and successful undertaking. A few years back the Provinces of Flanders had fallen into the greatest misery. There was an over-population as in Ireland, reduced to live on the meanest kind of diet, capital

having been driven from agriculture, and turbulent indigence, having taken its place. To add to this resemblance of Flanders to Ireland, its population was generally disaffected to the existing Government of Belgium, and openly regretted the Orange dynasty. Yet in the face of all these adverse circumstances, the Belgian Government and Chamber entered upon the Flemish question, instituted, first a searching inquiry into the causes of its distress, and then steadily applied what were considered the fitting remedies. These were neither so sweeping nor so searching as those that have been tried in Ireland, but they were attended with far more prompt and more effectual results. The province of Flanders has been restored to prosperity, and the bonds of attachment thus re-knit between them and the present liberal Government and Dynasty of Belgium. This, then, is the country which that consummate politician M. Louis Napoleon Bonaparte would take under his tutelage. But would it not be a wiser and a fairer course to place Franco under Belgian tutelage? Belgium, situate between France and Prussia, is evidently more than a century in advance of either. It progresses tranqually under a constitutional system which neither France nor Prussia can establish or retain. There is actually not one single department of public affairs, or one great political question, in which the two big countries might not with advantage take lessons of the little one. Yet such is the country to which France, dragged as it is at present at the very tail of European civilization, has the impudence to dictate and issue order's, to gratify the senseless spleen of an upstart. But for Belgium and Holland, indeed one might at present despair of the constitutional system in Europe. Every where else corruption, folly, and weakness have stifled it, or are about to do so. Yet in those important commercial and densely peopled countries, where there are accumulated the greatest difficulties of modem societies, credit, indigence, conflicting and a weak position between rival states, we find the constitutional flag still borne aloft, as the banner under which their complicated interests can be best secured and best develop themselves. The great sovereigns and courts of Europe have formed a kind of tacit league to protect Belgium from the repacity of the present ruler of France. They have done so in order to maintain the treaties of 1815 intact, and to keep proscribed and disavowed the old Napoleonian principle of setting treaties at nought, and of remodelling Europe its balance of power. Their object Jis the limited one of curbing the ambition and ascendency of France, though it is also no doubt a justifiable reason for a league of European defence. Yet a stronger reason might be found in the fact, that Belgium as a more free, more tranquil, more settled, more prosperous, happy, and constitutional country, deserves for her own sake that Europe should defend her against the barbarous military despotism of the lawless regime which prevails for the time in France.